Computation, Technology, and Culture

Founded on an understanding of computation as a creative medium in its own right, the Computation, Technology, and Culture (CTC) department at RISD supports multiple approaches to making with the digital tools, systems, and languages that increasingly shape lived experience.

CTC offers two undergraduate degree programs—the BFA in Art and Computation and the BFA in Sound—as well as a CTC concentration that allows you to integrate tech-informed processes into your major course of study. Though unique in their breadth and focus, each pathway is linked by a departmental ethos that fosters rigor, intentionality, and playfulness within the broad field of computational art and design practice.

Art and Computation BFA program

Offering an understanding of and ability to create within contemporary technological frameworks, the Art and Computation BFA supports work centered on code- and software-based making, both in their own right and as part of broader studio practices.

arrangement of yellow wire hooked into a small device in front of an open laptop

a student engages with a handheld, house-shaped device and observes images of birds on a desktop monitor

Sound BFA program

Encompassing sonic art, spatial audio, and other areas of research and making, the BFA in Sound lets you explore the key tools, concepts, and principles of sonic creative practice, working across a range of applications and with attention to historical and sociocultural contexts.

IKO 3D loudspeaker in the RISD Museum's Grand Gallery

a student sits behind a laptop, surrounded by several gold metallic boxes outfitted with wired audio speakers

CTC concentration

Combining hands-on practice with critical and historical analysis, the 15-credit CTC concentration offers an interdisciplinary platform for applying existing and ever-evolving digital methods of making to work in your major course of study.

a digital rendering of a large spherical object made from many tiny, rice-like particles

a pair of hands manipulating the wires on a circuit board at a workstation

A critical framework for computational making

In its approach to teaching, research, and studio making, the CTC department holds the potential of computational technologies in balance with the questions they raise: Computer vision alongside surveillance politics, generative systems alongside questions of authorship, AI alongside its cultural and environmental stakes.

Supported by this critical framework, students in all CTC pathways build tools and manipulate machines via experiments with both code and hardware, as critical awareness and technical capability develop in tandem. They learn about computation as a medium, about its histories and its politics, and create process- and systems-based work that changes the nature of making itself, at a fundamental level.

In and beyond the studio

student in a pink shirt adjusts knobs on modular synthesizer

a wall-mounted, larger artwork including several small paintings, connected to a wired device on the floor

a monitor displaying colorful, digitally-animated figures in a dark room

two students lean over a small device while flanked by sound equipment

a hand points at interactive digital art on a monitor with gray creature sculptures attached

a student interacts with a laptop-connected device sitting atop an exhibition podium

closeup of a multi-sided black audio speaker with a high, Art Deco-era ceiling in the background

a student manipulates a mouse while looking at a monitor that reads "Not a signal" in large letters

image

AI as creative force multiplier

In a wide-ranging conversation with RISD’s Admissions team, CTC Department Head Clement Valla identifies uses for AI in image-making and storytelling, and what the department and its studio programs are bringing to our creative community and the already-here future of art and design.